When a customer who has always paid on time slips into overdue, it’s usually the first sign something is wrong. You can check this in Xero’s aged receivables report but there’s no built-in alert for the moment an account moves from current to overdue. The fix is a tool that watches for the status change and emails you the first time an account tips over, so you can act before a one-off slip becomes a bad debt. Trove does this.
Summary
- The short answer: Xero won’t proactively tell you when a customer first goes overdue but you can find out by checking aged receivables. A tool like Trove alerts you the moment an account moves from current to overdue.
- Using Xero’s aged receivables: you can check overdue balances on a weekly basis in the aged receivables report, an overview of all customers with overdue balances.
- How Trove does it: it watches each account’s status and sends the first-overdue alert to you, not the customer, routed to whoever owns that account.
Why the first overdue invoice is an important signal
Plenty of overdue invoices are nothing to worry about. Often a client will have a regular payment run that is scheduled every Thursday (for example) and an invoice overdue on Wednesday will just get paid a day late.
But if an invoice is more than a few days late from a customer that usually pays on time, it’s worth taking notice. It’s often a signal that something has changed on their side: a cash flow problem, a dispute they haven’t raised, or in some sectors a funding or approval issue upstream (e.g. construction, not-for-profit).
In these cases, getting in touch early means you can help resolve the issue. If you only find out when the balance is already large, you’ve lost the window where a quick conversation would have fixed it.
What Xero can and can’t do on notifying overdue balances
Xero will show you what’s overdue. The aged receivables report and the invoices list both flag overdue items, and you can sort and filter them. The manual option is to set yourself a calendar reminder to check this report at the start of every week.
If you have a lot of accounts, a slightly fancier option is to download the report into Excel each week in a new tab and then automatically check for any customers who weren’t in last week’s report.
What Xero won’t do is notify you proactively when an account becomes overdue. At the time of writing (June 2026) they do not have a notification system built into the product.
How to get an alert when a customer stops paying
The reliable way to get an alert of a customer balance going overdue is to use a credit control tool that connects to Xero, tracks each account’s status, and notifies you on the change.
In Trove, this runs as a regular notification. Trove reads your invoices from Xero and watches when an account moves into overdue. The first time it happens, Trove can send you an alert. If you are monitoring a number of customers and don’t want an avalanche of emails, you can also receive this alert on a weekly or monthly basis.
Finally, you can route these alerts by team. If different people look after different customers or areas of the business, the alert for an account can go to the person that owns it. Read more on how to segment your Xero customers here.
The takeaway on receiving overdue balance alerts from Xero
Xero is good at showing you the current state of your receivables. It won’t watch for change and tap you on the shoulder. If catching problems early matters to you, you need something layered on top that does. Trove sends you a first-overdue alert automatically, routes it to the right person, and can roll it up into a weekly summary if you prefer.
Trove runs a free 30-day trial and takes about five minutes to connect to your Xero account.
FAQ
Can Xero notify me when an invoice becomes overdue?
No. Xero shows overdue invoices in the aged receivables report and the invoice list, but it doesn’t send a notification when an account changes from current to overdue. You have to check the report yourself.
How do I find out which customers have just gone overdue?
You either review your Xero aged receivables manually and track changes yourself, or you use a connected tool like Trove that watches for the status change and alerts you the first time an account tips into overdue.
Can I get the alert sent to me instead of the customer?
Yes. In Trove the first-overdue alert is an internal notification routed to you or the relevant team member, separate from the reminders that go to customers.
Does this work if I send thousands of invoices a month?
Yes. Trove tracks accounts at the customer level and clumps invoices together, so you get one alert per account rather than one per invoice, which is what makes it workable at high volume.
